Rhyme, Barbarism, and Manners from Trissino to Corneille

Abstract

The ancient Greeks and Romans did not rhyme; early modern Europeans did. The sources of rhyme were non- European, Asian, or African, and this caused early modern writers, such as Thomas Campion and Gian Giorgio Trissino, to either try to write without rhyme to recapture classical purities, or, such as Samuel Daniel, try to vindicate barbarism in arguing for rhyme. This chapter argues that, though Trissino sought to go back to the classics as a way of outflanking medieval barbarism, Davnenat and Corneille sought to use rhyme in chronicling an intermediate temporality which valued barbarian memory. Though their works on the subject were not successful in their own times, these writers still valiantly strove to reveal the pertinence of barbarian material to modern European manners.